Cindicator, one year on…
The following article documents my reflections on the past year; how I came to be part of the Cindicator community, some of the key moments and milestones since the token event from my observations, and why the experience of the past 12 months fills me with enthusiasm for Cindicator’s future.
My relationship with Cindicator began in the summer of 2017. While only little more than a year ago, it feels like almost an eternity. The ICO boom was in full force and market sentiment was through the roof. Looking at the space through the lens of social media (at the time, though it seems surprising now, Facebook was my main window into the world of crypto), the sense of positivity was palpable. Almost every new project and well-worked whitepaper were being greeted with wide-eyed optimism and a (slightly unhealthy) suspension of disbelief: a fledgling crypto project could purport to be the Web 3.0 equivalent of PayPal, Airbnb or even Google without it seeming preposterous. There was a revolutionary fervour in the air and no business model, it seemed, was safe from the disruptive impact of decentralisation.
We know now that this radicalism was, at best, premature. In retrospect, it wasn’t just the crypto investors who were drinking the Kool-Aid — many of the projects were too. Raises of $50m+ were quickly becoming the norm to finance the new economy, capitalising on both the global reach of the market and the wave of euphoria that was sweeping over (largely unsophisticated) investors.
Predicting the future
I first heard about Cindicator in a Facebook chat group. Amidst the feverish speculation in the group, something about Cindicator stood out to me. Firstly, the idea was predicated on something I hadn’t even considered. They weren’t trying to displace an existing legacy organisation or tech disruptor-come-behemoth. Cindicator’s proposition instead harnessed something that wasn’t possible in a centralised, company-centric paradigm: the project sought to harness the predictive power of a decentralised network of market analysts. This made more sense to me when I watched CTO Yuri Lobyntsev explain in a YouTube interview the notion of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ and how it could be used in a decentralised ecosystem to generate financial forecasts with a previously unimaginable level of accuracy.
Secondly, amidst the ICO madness, the project appeared attractive due to its clear intent on what it wanted from its fundraising. Unlike other projects raising at the time, Cindicator wasn’t opening the floodgates for anyone to pour money into the project. They had a sober-headed hardcap set at $15 million and were extremely selective on who they were allowing to participate. This sense of focus was refreshing and gave insight into the level of professionalism and long-term outlook the team would continually show over the coming year. The ICO was held in September 2017. It was managed methodically and judiciously, completely sidestepping the growing trend of ICO hysteria and avaricious ‘gas wars’.
Riding the bull
With its funding in place, the Cindicator team set to work on realising the vision it described in its whitepaper. Again, in an environment of hype and empty promises, Cindicator stood out from the pack with a clearly defined roadmap. The Cindicator forecasting app was already live, so the team’s focus was on (1) extending this app into a desktop client that would be more suitable for market research, chart analysis, etc., and (2) the launch of two core products — Cindicator Bot, a Telegram bot it would use to disseminate indicators to token holders, and its sister Cryptometer Bot, which identifies arbitrage opportunities arising from market inefficiencies.
Come Q4 2017, and these products launched against the backdrop of one of the most rampant bull markets in financial history. It seemed fated: the Cindicator Bot was the perfect accompaniment to the bull market, perfectly capturing the wild public sentiment and mania as day after day different coins took their turn to rally. For those in Cindicator’s Telegram chat group, it felt like the holy grail: every investor in the market was desperately seeking out whichever coin would ‘pop’ next, and those with Cindicator Bot had the inside scoop.
Unsurprisingly, given the fervour at the time, news spread around the market of Cindicator’s predictive power, bringing with it interest in the CND token. Speculative whispers grew louder that the price of a single CND token could go to 30c, $1…even $5! It’s testament to the state of the market that even with more than 1.4 billion tokens in circulation, this didn’t seem an outlandish valuation for a product that one Cindicator user on Telegram described as a ‘money-printing machine’. Despite this mania, the Cindicator team didn’t get ahead of themselves. They kept working to improve the app, steadily increase the number of indicators released, and update the roadmap without buying into the hype.
Building in a bear market
By late January, the inevitable happened. The mania of the bull market came to an abrupt halt and prices across the board crashed. At first it felt like a temporary blip, but the longer it continued the more sentiment changed and it became clear we were looking at an extended bear market.
This period came with its challenges for every project in the crypto market, and not least for Cindicator given that its core product — still in its infancy — was tasked with keeping a gauge on investors’ changing attitudes. The Bot had launched amidst euphoria, and now it was adapting to a period of mixed sentiment. Public hopes for a renewed bull run were being tempered with a growing realisation that the market was headed for a severe correction. More and more, this was being reflected in the indicators — the 70–80% indicators of bullish moves that had regularly been seen in December and January were gradually being replaced with sentiments as low as 10–20%.
As the dopamine dissipated and the new reality set in, it became more apparent that people were feeling pain. Across social media sites like Twitter and Reddit, ad hominem attacks on crypto influencers and disparagement of crypto projects were becoming increasingly visible. Throughout this tumultuous period, Cindicator did what it’s always done — the team continued to build. It made several additions to the team to strengthen in key areas such as data science and marketing, launched its first neural network (crucial for the Machine Learning component of the project), created a ‘Symbiotic Network’ of philosophically aligned companies, launched new products like Token Sale Review and made a steady stream of improvements to its existing products. Moreover, the size of the community continued to grow, surpassing 115k registered app users and more than 17,000 token holders, and the team also launched initiatives such as expert Q&As, trading events and its Avantgarde ambassador program to strengthen the ecosystem.
One year on
The impact of these building efforts is now coming to fruition and Cindicator today stands in a position of strength. The people that have stuck with the community genuinely believe in its vision and the technology underpinning Cindicator is continuing to improve and learn about one of the most complex and unpredictable markets in existence (evidenced by increasingly strong accuracy results). With the recent integration of CND tokens as rewards in the Cindicator App, more people will be incentivised to participate in the network and stake tokens for higher level product access.
For me personally, my confidence and belief in Cindicator has never been greater. I have always been hugely impressed by the team’s clear-headedness, commitment and ‘long-game’ approach. The crypto markets are still immature but will undergo seismic change in the coming years as new participants — including traditional financial institutions and digitally-native Gen Z investors — enter the market. Cindicator is well positioned to grow with this evolving market and continue to offer a unique value to those in its ecosystem.
I have no doubt at all that Cindicator is set for great things over the coming years, and I’m proud to be an active part of it. Well done team on reaching this milestone and best of luck for year two!
